1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems and methods for determining preferences with regard to marketing and other stimuli.
2. Background Information
In developing or selecting a new product or service, a company, such as a consumer product company, typically undertakes a number of market research studies to evaluate the new product or service. These studies may include surveys, interviews and focus groups. Focus groups are often used to acquire feedback and other information regarding new products or services. Focus groups allow the consumer product company to test the new product and make changes before it is made available to the public. The feedback and other information generated by the focus group provide insight into the potential acceptance of the new products or services in the marketplace. Despite their use, focus groups have been subject to criticism. In particular, it has been noted that members of focus groups often try to please the moderator rather than offer independent opinions or evaluations. In addition, the feedback and other information can be misinterpreted.
In addition to market research studies, new tools related to neuromarketing have been used to study consumer's sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli. With neuromarketing, researchers use diagnostic or other equipment, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure changes in activity in parts of the consumer's brain, and sensors to measure changes in a consumer's physiological state, such as heart rate, respiratory rate, etc., in an effort to learn why consumers make particular decisions. Although, the brain does not “lie”, measures made from the brain depend on very sophisticated technology, and cannot be readily implemented on the Internet. Furthermore, neuromarketing approaches have yet to find any recurrent, robust, and scalable law-like patterns to human judgment and decision-making (i.e., choice behavior). Absent applications based on such recurrent, robust, and scalable law-like patterns based on behavior, physiological, or neural signals, neuromarketing approaches, and traditional approaches based on focus groups, cannot accurately and objectively map out the space of human preference.